Ranking Star Wars

8. Attack of the Clones

Look, I admit it, I enjoy the prequels. Despite their very real flaws I respect their scope, boundless imagination, and their willingness to be very different movies from their beloved antecedents.  However, while Attack of the Clones has some of the series best and most fun sequences, it is the one prequel that really collapses under the weight of George Lucas' flaws as a writer and director. His disinterest in directing actors and writing dialogue make chunks of this movie damn near unwatchable. While none of the Lucas written movies have good dialogue, Clones has lines like Anakin ruminating on his feelings about sand and Jango Fett describing himself as "a simple man trying to make my way in the universe." On top of that Lucas manages to get bad performances out of Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman, both of whom are actually good actors.

All that being said, there is plenty to enjoy in Clones which is more of a swashbucking adventure in the vein of the original movies. The Obi-Wan story in this one takes the form of a noir-ish detective tale leading him to some of the series' most interesting locales. Anakin's story manages to get back on the rails once it gets to Tattooine and his arc there dark and consequential. Once the movie gets to its last act, it is firing on all cylinders, and we not only get a giant battle featuring dozens of Jedi, the epic start of the Clone Wars, and a lightsaber battle featuring none other than Yoda himself.

7. Return of the Jedi

Compared to the groundbreaking fun of Star Wars and the darkness and relative maturity of Empire, Return of the Jedi seems like a somewhat uninspired and perfunctory conclusion to the beloved Original Trilogy. It is a lazy movie that copies sections wholesale from its predecessors, whether it is a creature cantina on steroids in the form of Jabba's Palace or a bigger louder assault on yet another another Death Star, much Jedi feels a little too familiar. Combine that with stilted performances from Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher (both of whom were well over it at this point) and a fairly ridiculous ground battle in which a bunch of teddy bears defeat the Emperor's "finest troops" and you have a movie that feels like its creators just wanted to wrap the whole series up and move on to other things.

All that being the case, Jedi has some great sequences such as the assault on the Death Star II and lightsaber duel both of which are improvements on their corresponding Episode IV moments. I'm not one of those practical effects fetishists, but Jabba the Hutt holds up as an amazing movie creature and is certainly better than any of the digital versions that have appeared in other movies over the years.

6. The Force Awakens

J. J. Abrams has a gift for making blockbuster movies with an emphasis on character and relationships. He also casts really good actors and gets good performances out of them. These were much needed in the the Star Wars series and, on this front, The Force Awakens succeeds where all of its predecessors have failed and introduces a charismatic new generation of actors who turn in compelling, credible, performances and deliver dialogue that doesn't sound like it was translated into English by a computer. However, The Force Awakens has a fatal flaw for a Star Wars movie: it is profoundly unimaginative.

Much has been said about it's recycled plot (although The Phantom Menace and Return of the Jedi both repeated plot points from A New Hope  and the various Kurasawa movies from which it borrowed) but the real sin of The Force Awakens is the criminally lazy and uninspired design. If nothing else, the Star Wars movies have all delivered groundbreaking design and effortless visual world-building but The Force Awakens really contributes nothing new to the visual world of Star Wars. At the very least, I expect a Star Wars movie to provide interesting environments, ships, aliens, and costumes and The Force Awakens really did none of that. It's most successful visual contributions to Star Wars are Kylo Ren and BB-8, both of which are derivative of Original Trilogy designs. Planets? Jakku, which is Tattooine with crashed spaceships. Spaceships? All the original ship designs are vague slabs. For a film series built on imaginative visuals, this is a big problem.

 5. The Phantom Menace

Mostly famous for being a movie that nerds on the Internet love to hate, it is easy to forget that this was a well-reviewed, immensely popular movie upon its initial release. Like any movie that George Lucas was involved with it has its flaws (questionable alien characterizations, awkward dialogue, and badly-directed acting) but it also has Lucas' wonderful visual imagination and unparalleled skill for cinematic storytelling. It also has a truly spectacular lightsaber battle which is scored with one of the best pieces of music in a Star Wars movie (which is really saying something.)

Perhaps TPM's greatest sin against fandom was being strikingly different from its predecessors in tone and visual style and not being particularly interested in providing fan service. It is interesting to compare it to The Force Awakens as both were highly anticipated movies released after a long lapse in Star Wars films and while TFA seemed to be designed from the ground up to give the fans what they wanted, with Phantom Lucas was really only concerned with telling the story he wanted to tell. This is a movie that has none of the things that fans were expecting. There was no hint of the Clone Wars. Anakin was a small child. The Jedi were presented as aloof and ambivalent characters. The movie was largely set in halls of power instead of grungy spaceships and rebel bases. The movie presented a totally different paradigm for Star Wars.

4. The Empire Strikes Back

Considered by many to be the best movie of the Original Trilogy, Empire splits our heroes up and sends them all on dark and consequential journeys. For a 1980's space fantasy, Empire is full of  moody imagery and takes the series in a rich and mythic direction.

While Empire has some of the series' most iconic sequences-the epic Hoth ground battle, the dreamy and enigmatic lightsaber battle in the Dagobah cave, and Vader's shocking revelation-it also feels a bit small in comparison to rest of the movies. While it has been justly praised for being more personal and character driven than the rest of the Lucas-produced movies, it also is a bit smaller in scope and lacks some of the wild imagination of those movies.

Empire, it should be noted, also features some of Lucas' characteristically terrible/awkward dialogue such as Han Solo's painfully adolescent arguing with Princess Leia, her referring to him as "laserbrain" and Han's puzzing description of his relationship with Lando "Well, I don't trust him either. But he is my friend." Bad dialogue is not only found in the prequels but also in the "best" of the original movies.

3. Rogue One

The first "Star Wars Story" makes a lot of bold choices such as focusing on a group of previously unknown characters and killing them all off at the end. It is also darker and more adult than the rest of the movies. It goes a long way towards expanding what a Star Wars movie can be here presenting a gritty war/espionage movie in a Star Wars context. Compare the third acts of Rogue One and Return of the Jedi as both movies focus  a group of rebels infiltrate an Imperial facility on a planet on missions that facilitate the destruction of a Death Star and you can see how much Star Wars has grown and changed over the years.

Because the film is set literally moments before Episode IV it is very much tied to that movie's iconography but still manages to carve out a space of its own. It not only introduces some new designs that fit into the existing world but it manages to portray familiar elements in new and exciting ways. The movie prominently features the Death Star but we've never quite seen it shot like this before. Director Gareth Edwards has a gift for scale and there are some imaginative and truly beautiful shots of the Empire's mobile battle station in this movie.

Is it perfect? No. It could have paid a little more attention to fleshing out its main characters. It also follows the unfortunate pattern of shoehorning Chinese stars into Hollywood movies. While the new Star Wars movies deserve a lot of credit for their diverse casting, this feels like an inorganic way to appeal to the massive Chinese box office, where Star Wars has never been particularly popular. What's more, the movie presents his character as a kind of monkish quasi-Jedi who speaks in fortune cookie quotes (including the laziest and most unimaginative mantra ever). He is even given a big martial arts sequence which seems out of place in a Star Wars movie. Donny Yen clearly has a lot of charisma and would have worked in any number for roles in Rogue One, why did he have to be cast in one that seems so much like an Asian stereotype?

2. Revenge of the Sith

Most people would agree that ROTS is the best of the prequels but for me it is the least flawed and best of the original hexology of movies. Sith is darker, richer, and more complex and adult than any of the other original Star War movies and it is a bold and visionary cinematic experience. While it's immediate predecessor was mired by melodrama, Revenge of the Sith embraces its nature as mythic Tragedy, putting the opera in Space Opera.

Sith is a movie that transcends the flaws of George Lucas as a filmmaker. Certainly it misfires in places-Anakin's journey is not all there, Padme being described as having lost "the will to live," Vader's melodramatic "Noooooo!"-but more often than not it works and often when it does it is brilliant not coincidentally in moody, dialogue-free moments such as Anakin and Padme staring off at each other over the Coruscant landscape, the long montage of the Jedi being systematically killed all over the galaxy during Order 66, and the intercutting of the literal birth of Luke and Leia and the metaphorical birth of Darth Vader.

Sith will be remembered as the movie in which Star Wars grew up and expanded beyond kiddie space fantasy. 

1. Star Wars: A New Hope

While Revenge of the Sith, Rogue One, and The Empire Strikes Back are technically better movies, nothing compares to the sheer energy and imagination of Star Wars. We now live in a world in which the iconography of Star Wars is everywhere so it is easy to forget how funky, bold, and bizarre this movie was when it was released. Had it failed to catch on it would be reviled as a work of 1970's WTFery but instead it became a phenomenon and a a towering work of popular imagination.